Ghost Hunting 101: The burden of proof on 'spectral evidence'

Heather Baker

Sunday

Oct 28, 2007 at 12:01 AMOct 28, 2007 at 6:29 PM

Ron Kolek is an environmental scientist who just happens to believe in ghosts. Not only does he believe in them, he founded the New England Ghost Project to hunt them down and conduct investigations into their presence. But he wasn’t born a believer.

Ron Kolek is an environmental scientist who just happens to believe in ghosts.

Not only does he believe in them, he founded the New England Ghost Project to hunt them down and conduct investigations into their presence. But he wasn’t born a believer.

“I never believed in ghosts. I never believed in psychics,” Kolek confessed to an audience at his recent ghost hunting seminar, Spectral Evidence: Ghost Hunting 101, held last Saturday night as part of Salem’s Festival of the Dead. “I thought they were a bunch of charlatans here to take your money.”

But that changed the day Kolek had a pulmonary embolism in a hospital intensive care unit. At that moment, he said, he had what he calls a “strange effect.” He felt warm and was surrounded by a bright light and voices that he couldn’t understand.

“It was a comfortable feeling,” he said. “Like I was going home.”

The feeling quickly faded as he awoke and found himself lying in the ICU. In the following weeks, his experience opened the door to a curiosity about the spirit world.

During his recovery, Kolek enrolled in a television production class and created a show about ghosts. Soon after the class was finished, he created the New England Ghost Project. Together with fifth-generation psychic Maureen Wood and a team of technology specialists, Kolek leads investigations into “the unknown field.”

The seminar he hosted sold out, and people were packed into the seats in the basement of the Hawthorne Hotel.

Wood took a poll of the audience: “How many people here have had a paranormal experience?”

A dozen or so hands rose above the sea of heads. “And how many of you have had these experiences all your life?”

Four or five hands remained. The room was quiet with expectation as the seminar began. After an introduction by the festival’s organizer, local Salem witch Christian Day, Kolek and Wood shared stories of their team’s explorations of haunted lighthouses, spooky hotels and exorcisms in family homes.

In the audience, believers and skeptics alike listened eagerly. Some of them were hoping for verification of what they have experienced themselves; others might have been hoping for a reason to believe, or simply expecting an evening of entertainment.

The ghost hunters described their mission to understand and record, with scientific methods, the existence of the spirits they encounter. Using a PowerPoint presentation (which suffered from several technical glitches before the show continues), Kolek’s technicians presented the tools of their trade. These range from basic film and digital cameras and camcorders, and simple voice recorders, to more complex infrared night vision systems and electromagnetic field meters that respond to spikes in energy.

The presenters shared sound clips from their experiences, which were filtered to sound like recognizable words. Could the sound be a recorded creak in the floorboards, or is it truly the deep, garbled voice of an angry lighthouse keeper who fell tragically to his death?

“This is an unknown field, you have to experiment with it,” Kolek said, emphasizing his mission to combine his scientific need to question everything with his paranormal experiences.

Kolek revealed to the seminar audience that he has a Catholic background and relies on symbols of his religious beliefs to protect him from the evils of the spirit world. He wears a large wooden cross around his neck, carries rosary beads diligently and uses holy water for spiritual protection. He and Maureen educated the group about the many ways to protect themselves using these items.

As one of the technicians later examined a video recorder with a dead battery, he recommended that the group use holy water on their camera batteries to protect the batteries from being drained by a ghost.

In the back of the room, a concerned woman addressed the room: “I wear an insulin pack that’s battery powered. Will I have a problem?”

The technician recommended an application of holy water before the group’s trip to the graveyard later that night, and said not to worry, that she’d be just fine.

With the New England Ghost Project, Kolek is making it his mission to bring a scientific perspective to the controversial topic of the supernatural. With that, his work invites greater analysis and questioning than some of Halloween’s more commercial entertainment.

Kolek’s Web site (www.neghostproject.com) acknowledges the complex issue, opening with the following lines: “Come with us on a journey into … A world where science and religion clash, or do they?”

For tickets and information about more Festival of the Dead programs, visit www.festivalofthedead.com or call 800-595-4849.

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